Winning Response to April 2010 Challenge on TSH
by Cuzosu
Summary: Reno has a nightmare? Maybe pranks will help him deal with it...  Written for April 2010 Challenge posted on a proboards site called The Seventh Heaven. M for language, yaoi and real life references, humor, etc.


Okay, here ya go!

I have no title for this.

Word count? Somewhere over 3,000. The thing on Word said 3,400 something. All I know is it took me about a day's worth of non-stop writing to complete, but I did it in stages.

Disclaimer: I own nothing but the demented humor, much as I wish otherwise.

WARNINGS: rated M for IMPLICATIONS (yaoi), MATURE language, and MAJOR psychological issues. (*slaps face, drags hand down despairingly* So I have issues... It was all because the M thing kinda got to me for a moment. MAYBE I'm tired...)

Without further ado, readers dear, the story. If you have time and are willing, please review. Let me know what you think. *yawns, wanders off to find Mountain Dew*

Rude startled awake when his partner and lover jumped back to consciousness and barely choked back a scream. Hoping it wasn't what he thought it was, the large man laid a hand on the redhead's shoulder. One black eyebrow rose, achieving its dual purpose of calming Reno and silently asking what had woken him. Well, them.

"Fuck!" cursed the most spastic of the TURKs.

Next to him, his partner waited, seemingly endless patience—but Reno knew better than to believe that. He'd learned the hard way that, if ordered or merely pushed far enough, his partner would lash out, and Gaia help anyone on the receiving end. Rude was the powerhouse of the TURKs, the strongest of them. The bald man was also the one who liked playing with explosives the most, too.

"... nightmare," Reno finally mumbled.

"YOU had a nightmare?"

The irony of this situation was not lost on either partner.

"Hey, I know I'M supposed to be the nightmare, not the one suffering from it. It's the damn dream that doesn't, yo!"

It was all Rude could do not to laugh. "And...what was this nightmare about?"

Nothing he tried could get the redhead to fess up the subject of his nightmare. So, they went about their day. Internally, Rude hoped that whatever pranks Reno had set up earlier lifted his mood for the rest of the day.

It was April Fool's day, and the bald man still had no idea why his bosses had insisted everyone show up at work today (Nor, truth be told, did his redheaded lover or their female comrade). Or, for that matter, why they inevitably had orders to show up for every single one of the holidays, including the ones that should be spent with family. There wasn't what he'd call family spirit in their group; everyone just backed each other up in lethal situations. That couldn't really be called family spirit—it was just a way of reciprocating. Which wasn't to say any of them knew for sure how many times they'd saved or been saved by any other of them, because not even Tseng cared, so long as they were doing their jobs. (This perhaps explained why he hadn't fired Reno yet; for all of his pranking and general chaos-rousing, the mouthy man was adept at doing his job, no matter what his personal opinion of it was.)

The second the partners walked in the door to work, they could feel a chorus of eyes staring—_glaring_—at them. Well, at Reno. Rude, always the professional, ignored it. Reno, on the other hand...

"Yo! Ya miss me? What's with the looks?" All of this was said with a smug smile, fooling no one. He was guilty of something—probably what they were mad at him for.

"Reno," began Tseng, black hair lending a more ominous look to his scowl. "You have some explanations to make."

Rufus, turning the corner to join this "discussion," was glaring disdainfully. "I, for one, would like an explanation on what the hell, precisely, you did with my chair."

"Well, I know you've had that chair for several years, yo, and, since after several years of being sat in _any_ chair needs replacement, I decided to make things more convenient for ya." This fell off his tongue glibly, with all the sweetness of honey.

Too bad nobody was naïve enough to believe it.

"So you replaced it with a _toilet_?" hissed his blond boss.

Rude put a hand to his face, ensuring that his partner was the only one who had any notion that he was trying not to laugh.

"Well, isn't it more convenient? I mean, now ya don't have to leave your office if you need to, ah, use the facilities." He smirked.

This was generally understood to mean going to the bathroom or jacking off. Elena coughed, hand over her mouth in an attempt to restrain her laughter. Tseng couldn't decide if he was mortally embarrassed or amused. Reno had that effect on people.

Rufus couldn't find a response that wouldn't make him sound as immature as the redhead, so he tried something different. "Tell me, then. What. Did you do. With my chair?" he bit out.

"I moved it," came the smooth response. But he wouldn't say where to.

Eventually, Rude found the chair at his desk, solving one problem. But, needless to say, when you worked with Reno on April Fool's day, there was more than just one problem. And the _reason_ for all these problems was that Reno was forced to work on a day meant for fun. But, reasons aside, still there were…complications to his fellow coworkers' and bosses' day.

First, Tseng nearly had an apoplexy when he discovered that his computer screen wouldn't light up and several days worth of paperwork were missing. Then Elena found herself stuck in a bathroom stall—and had to climb out through the ventilation system. She fell into a board meeting on accident, blushing furiously. Reno mostly had his snickering under control by the time her pounding footsteps made it back into the ShinRa Manufacturing Department in Administrative Research (or rather, the TURKs office). But Elena still smacked him for it.

The other TURKs—and Rufus—attempted paybacks, of course—but Reno had known they would eventually, and was prepared. Rude wasn't surprised when their comrades' pranks started backfiring on them. Elena sat on a whoopee cushion with the words "Nice try" written in black permanent marker. Tseng had to take his desk apart to get the bike horn out of his drawer so it would stop honking every time he went to grab paperwork. Rufus discovered that the way his prank had backfired had really pissed Tseng off—mainly because his lover was unhappy that he'd had strippers trying to get in his pants in the office instead of asking the dark-haired TURK for a little alone time.

Okay, so Rufus knew it was his own mess up. He should have known the redhead would make it come back on him somehow. It was just...he hadn't been expecting THAT. Reno was renowned for his innuendos and blatant sexuality. The man was NOT known for turning down anything to do with sex. Being turned down by his coworkers? Most of them were smart enough to know they'd be putting their lives on the line and avoided it. But Rufus would have thought Reno would do more with them, even just to make Rude jealous, than smile amusedly at the girls and send them to his office.

In fact, the only one who was completely out of the pranking cycle was Rude. Or so it seemed.

Reno had left Rude out of the pranks because his lover had some...creative and well-thought-out ways of getting him back when he pulled one on him. But this year, Rude was going to start it...

The redhead had just sat down at his desk, having finally decided he could probably relax for the rest of the day because no one had attempted to prank him since noon—and it was quitting time for anyone normal—when he felt a slight tug from the chair beneath him and heard an ominous squeak. He almost had time to swear, looking up to see what he had to dodge...

A bucket of water took him full in the face, and Reno stalked over to his partner, who had been in the office the entire time he'd been out. "What. The. Hell, yo!" he bit out.

Rude propped his mouth on his fist to hide his grin, but he couldn't stop chuckling. "... You look like a stray cat that's been in one too many rain storms..."

Green eyes glared at the explosives expert. "You started it," he warned the bald man. Then he walked away.

Tseng, of course, missed none of this, and said to Rude later, "I was expecting that from Reno."

But Rude wasn't the only one who knew how to play Reno-style pranks—and Reno being himself, he was better at them. It was only a matter of time before he got Rude—and his fellow TURKs knew it, too. He could feel their watchful gazes, even though they were good enough as TURKs to make sure they weren't caught in the act.

Two hours after being soaked—which Rude had found inordinately sexy and everyone else tried to convince themselves _wasn't_—Reno could feel the anticipation weighing on them all. Not only was it well after NORMAL people's office hours, but even the TURKs generally only had one or two people in the office this time of night—if that. He sighed to himself, stretched, and yawned.

"Well, I guess I'd better get him back before he completely forgets why I'm doing it, yo." The redhead stood up and smirked to himself. Oh, yeah, he was going to enjoy this…! He shut the door behind himself with a facetious smile to his partner.

The cocky TURK swaggered off, supposedly to the bathroom—but Rude wasn't fooled and suspiciously stayed in their office. He hadn't heard what his partner had been muttering to himself about, but he could guess, and he wasn't stepping foot outside the room until Reno agreed to a truce.

As it turned out, that was a mistake.

Knockout gas snuck in through the ventilation system, hitting Rude before he could even think about ducking out the door or opening a window. Reno had known it would be the last thing his partner would expect, because the redhead was one of those people who preferred to see the reactions his pranks and attitudes garnered in response. The lithe, long-haired man waited just long enough to be sure his partner was going to be out a while, and then snuck in through the vent. There was a gas mask on his face that he'd stashed in a locked cupboard in one of the supply closets for a different prank, but this one would do just as well—no, better!

It took Rude several moments to realize where he was and why he felt so thirsty. And he didn't know why everyone who saw him as he walked past stared and started laughing. One glance in a bathroom mirror made him do a double-take, and he was sure Reno knew he was going to be put through hell for this.

See, Rude's face had been done up with clown make-up—and he looked like a circus dog, complete with the collar. So it was no wonder that Reno had been conspicuously absent when he'd woken up, nor was it any surprise that everyone had been laughing at him. He quickly washed his face, and then….

_Now to find the obnoxious redhead_, he thought to himself.

He eventually tracked his partner down. They faced off near the elevator shaft near the parking lot in the ground floor, one a little bit pissed and highly amused, the other a little bit amused and extremely pissed off. It was the modern version of a duel before the flag hit the ground, and secretly, the other TURKs and Rufus had gathered around the security monitors in the upper levels to watch.

Reno smirked as Rude almost growled, and then he shook his flame-colored hair. "Ah, ah, ah!" chided the smug redhead. "I have _photos_ you don't want spread around, yo!"

This had the predictable result of Rude stopping in his tracks, nostrils flared with anger, dark gaze riveted on his partner so intently even viewers could see where he was staring through the sunglasses. He nearly growled.

"What. Do you. Want?"

"Well, I know if I take this any further you're going to kill me…. So how 'bout we make a deal, yo? If you agree to call a truce on this whole pranking thing between us, I'll let you burn all the copies of the pic of you in clown make-up."

"And what happens to the original?" Rude wanted to know.

"Never let me have any fun, yo," muttered Reno. "Fine, you can have all the damn pictures. You'd kill me and whoever else got to it, anyways…."

Eventually they hashed out an agreement and Rude got to burn the original and copies of that photo, and Reno took great pleasure in wiping all the tapes the bald man had shown his dog-semblance on while said bald and brooding partner watched. There was another truce settling itself between them again, and tonight was building up with some nice dramatics.

Rude thought back on his experimentation with pranking, and concluded, _Pranking obviously not being my forte…. I'm done._

But then all hell broke loose.

First, Reno decided that—to celebrate their truce—they should prank everyone else in the building. This, apparently, included subtly taping the toilet paper to itself, leaving crude graffiti all over Tseng's office, sawing Elena's chair so that it would break the next time she sat in it, and then getting copies of the picture one of the two kids that tough AVALANCHE chick, Tifa, and her blond boyfriend, Cloud, had wound up adopting must have drawn. The picture was copied a ridiculous number of times, with the added words, "Congratulations, Rufus ShinRa! You have won first prize in the Cloud Strife Fan Art Contest!" And then the copies were pinned to their blond boss's office walls, his door, taped to his windows, extra copies placed on, in and under his desk, with added piles on the arms of his chair—where he wasn't likely to notice them before accidentally knocking them off—for the express purpose of pissing him off.

Yeah, Reno had a talent, alright. He had a big mouth, a bad attitude, a sinfully delicious body, and a habit of deliberately baiting _everybody_. Which, in a way, was exactly his aim when he played pranks on people—and Reno had great aim, when he could be bothered to use it.*

Second, the redhead insisted that, to avoid paybacks at least for the rest of the night, they pull a prank on the entire building. So Rude found himself wondering why he was going along with his partner even as he hacked into the upper, emergency levels of the building's security and set off the fire alarms and sprinkler system.

Of course everything electronic or paper the water could touch was ruined and there wasn't any fire unless Reno's hair was counted, so it was an obvious conclusion that as soon as they settled in to work tomorrow, Tseng would have figured it out (if he hadn't already) and they'd be in for a world of retribution that Reno had so far been the only one privy to. True, this was because he was the one who most often raised the Wutaian man's ire, but the fact remained that no one else knew the depths of Tseng's more vengeful side—first-hand, at least; Reno's mouth had a habit of letting every complaint that crossed his mind pass his lips. Everyone had heard about it, but second-hand information was heresy and tended to be unreliable—and with Reno, one never quite knew if he was exaggerating to get a rise from the listener.

So it was with some trepidation that when Reno asked Rude why he'd been brooding, the bald man said, "About the earlier pranks…the ones between us…." He sighed. "I…was thinking about how bad I am at things like that, how it's more your area than mine…."

"Spit it out, yo!" came Reno's impatient demand.

"It's just…I thought it would be the last time I'd be doing THAT again…. Pulling pranks, I mean." It was hard to articulate what he meant sometimes…especially with having the verbose redhead as a partner—and the one who normally spoke for both of them, even if Rude _did_ usually think it could have been phrased better.

Reno just laughed. "As if! We're partners, yo! In everything!"

Rude couldn't refute that. It was true. They lived together, worked together, took vacations together, slept together, did everything together. The duo weren't Siamese twins, but they might as well have been. There existed no parts of either's life that excluded the other.

They made it home that night without further mishaps and with a decisive lack of anything prank-related, and it wasn't until they were getting into bed that Rude remembered why he'd been hoping the course of the day would cheer his redheaded lover up. What kind of nightmare had Reno _had_, anyways? Reno didn't spook easily, tended to laugh off most of what would scare anyone else on the planet, and was a renowned daredevil. So _what_, exactly, had given him nightmares? He couldn't resist the urge to know, so he asked.

"… If you tell anybody about this, so much as a fucking _soul_, I swear, Rude, you'll regret the existence of Gaia and everything on it," hissed the redhead, green eyes dark—whether with unease or anger, Rude wasn't sure.

The bald man nodded as if he knew exactly why his partner was so wary, still without a clue. Was this what nightmares did to normal people—to people who weren't TURKs, who weren't AVALANCHE, who weren't Rufus Gaia-damned ShinRa? If so, he didn't like it. And either way, having Reno this paranoid would make his life and workplace a living hell, so this had to be dealt with.

"… Zombies."

It obviously made sense to Reno, but Rude was drawing a blank. Yeah, they'd had a horror marathon the previous night, and yeah, they'd all been zombie flicks…. But was Reno really saying he'd had a nightmare about _zombies_? Gaia, they only killed monsters and other people on a regular basis…. What kind of horror was there left to inspire nightmares just because of watching zombie movies? And _why_ was it affecting him so badly that he'd even dropped his slum-beginnings accent? Reno only spoke like a professional when he was off his game—the explanation Rude had gotten once mentioned something about slums people being underestimated more, deemed unintelligent.

Frustrated with his partner's incomprehension, Reno finally elaborated. "… I had a dream that I'm pretty sure came from some of the resemblances between the Resident Evil movies and the experiments ShinRa Corp. and that psycho bastard Hojo used to do…."

Rude blinked. Well, he supposed there wasn't _that_ much of a stretch between the two situations….

"In the dream, Tseng and Elena went to investigate one of the ruptured reactors."

Rolling his eyes, Rude couldn't help but acknowledge that, were he and Reno unavailable at the time or had Tseng thought their skills could be better used elsewhere, it likely _would_ be that pair who would investigate a damaged reactor. But telling his partner this would only be stating the obvious and stalling the full tale about what had really been nightmarish about the dream.

"And neither noticed they'd been infected by the bites until it was too late—so Rufus got bitten, too, and you and I had to kill all three of them."

Okay, this would have caused a few psychological problems for Rude, too. Having to terminate his two bosses and his junior comrade? People he'd been close to for years? It would have messed with the explosives expert's head, too.

But Reno wasn't done yet. "We were too distracted to realize you'd been bitten, too, and were having some kinky foreplay, when _you_ turned into a zombie and tried to take a bite out of me." He didn't say he'd been pinned down at the time—he didn't need to.

Rude was too in shock to comment on how…oddly disturbing this nightmare of Reno's really was.

"I think you were biting me when I woke up, because I don't remember the impact of teeth or the feeling of pain, just that _**oh, shit**_ moment when I jerked awake."

Reno looked absolutely miserable, so Rude pulled him close and cuddled. But obviously the redhead wasn't quite done yet, as he rose up on an elbow to look his partner in the eyes that weren't covered by sunglasses at the moment.

"You're not taking top for a while, yo," he told his lover seriously.

Unable to stop the laughter, Rude just nodded agreement. The accent was back, so Reno had to be feeling better now.

*No, I didn't mean that to sound kinky…but I'm not upset that it does, either.


End file.
